Flight of the Zebra Pony.

Once again, a product of the Kirby collage process, with varying levels of blur and brightness from background to foreground.

Every day that I get into the Loaner car to drive to work, Zebra Pony looks mildly unhappy. I contend that it’s because Zebra Pony isn’t in his favorite chair, the “shotgun” seat of my own beloved car. Things look much more positive on that front, as major progress toward the final repair and return of my Millennium Falcon like vehicle happened today. Fingers crossed, True Believers.

Still, the Free Loaner (complete with cartoon advertisements and big race car style logos) has been very useful, and a very workmanlike replacement for both Zebra Pony and me. It’s a Honda Fit, which is a pretty reliable, easy to handle little vehicle with massive gas mileage per gallon. It makes a quick, easy, and above all CHEAP commute to work while the car is in the shop….a very good thing. I definitely could have done without the long delays, but some things…they are what they are.

This is the second appearance of “FC3” the loaner vehicle in the strip. “FC3” because that name is emblazoned on the size of my bright red loaner car. I wanted to portray Zebra Pony’s unhappiness, and felt that having him hauled around by his arrangement of gold necklaces was a good way to go. There’s no “shotgun seat” on a flying horse, after all. All of Zebra Pony’s favorite places have been over run this week, with a giant stack of paperwork on my desk, where he usually looks over the class, and the computer.

At least that spot will be returned to the poor Zebra Pony tomorrow, since I have been relentless in my entry of grades and data, and am in fact done with the report card a full two days in advance of the due date. The time for a “desk purge” is very much upon me, where student work is handed back, trash thrown out, and all sorts of things are generally neatened and straightened. That’s today’s quest, along with finishing up “Catcher in the Rye” this week.

The longest chapter of “Catcher in the Rye,” the second to last one, is upon us. The students seem to be enjoying the book well enough, and levels of comprehension seem high, which is good. Personally, I wouldn’t have chosen the text myself, in retrospect. It doesn’t really have enough “challenge” to it, there’s not much to decode in the language, nor are the themes and symbolism all that complex. It’s okay, to be sure, and it is easy enough to understand why it is a well respected novel, but in some ways I feel like I would have rather taken the harder road of “Julius Caesar” or “Macbeth” as a choice of text. In many ways, it feels like I’m hauling the students along through the book in much the same way that the protagonist is dragging Zebra Pony on that Loaner Pegasus.

The foreground pencils, without background.

Thankfully, the week is going well. Sure, there was a completely unexpected CST Exam from the State of California, in a subject that all of my students took a year ago, but that…that’s a tale for another post.